what does living 'vegan' really mean?

I've met several people that introduced themselves as vegans, while in fact they were vegetarians that mainly live vegan. I'm totally fine with those! I never called myself vegan at that state of my journey towards veganism, but for a long time I was something in-between vegan and vegetarian, because I simply couldn't let go of certain foods (in my case honey and occasionally cheese) or still believed I needed them from time to time.
I can totally understand what you are going through and I believe becoming vegan for real is a process that just very few people manage to come by at their first try. Still, please don't call yourself vegan then, because it makes vegans in general look inconsequent and their recall in media and general opinions of us are bad enough ;) By the way, there will be a post on vegans / vegetarians in the media some time next week (--> title will be: Phoebe Buffay).

So the vegan philosophy is quite simple:
If anywhere along the process of making the product you intend to buy where animals involved, it is not vegan. So honey isn't, as it's made by bees; leather shoes aren't, as it's cow-skin; milk, eggs and any products made out of such obviously aren't vegan as well and if you intend to eat soy-yoghurt or something like this is only vegan if the bacteria processing within weren't extracted from whey. Make-up is only vegan if it wasn't tested on animals and has no other ingredients in it extracted out of animals or animal produced products. Also clothes, shampoo and such can be non-vegan, so watch out!

This might sound very restricting, but it's quite easy to implement to real live as there are various signs made for vegan products and the "animal involved - not food; entirely plant based - food" rule really is convertible even for dummies. Soy products, bean curd and any kind of lentils are great substitutions for what formerly was the meat or cheese share of the dish!